Mobile gambling is a major industry, bringing in millions upon millions of pounds a year globally. It’s also an industry that’s growing – set to be worth almost 75 billion dollars by 2023. Part of this is because of the increased ownership of smartphones across the world, but it’s also significantly aided by new technologies that are helping to enhance user experiences and give the industry more value. Here’s how.
The Cloud
The cloud is changing everything, but with Internet speeds getting faster and faster, it will keep becoming more and more relevant. Currently, the most popular choices on Online Casinos are either websites or apps, but the cloud will help to bring back the web-app to the mobile setting.
With cloud-enabled services, mobile gambling sites will be able to offer increasingly detailed and featureful user experiences without the need to download apps – giving users less waiting time and more playing time. This will require very good internet connections (or large data packages), but in the next few years access to the Internet will improve, as will bandwidth and speeds across the board.
Virtual Reality Headsets
VR headsets like the Oculus series and HTC Vive have already changed gaming, but the big changes to the gambling world are set to come when virtual reality gets more widespread and commoditized.
It will enable casinos to deliver many of the benefits that come from brick and mortar casinos – socializing, atmosphere, music; it will make mobile gambling more of a complete, immersive and three-dimensional experience. It will also no doubt be more profitable for casinos, as gamblers will spend more time gaming if they are immersed.
Artificial Intelligence
If you’ve ever seen a film about card-counting, you probably imagine casino security sitting in a room full of CCTV screens keenly looking for irregularities. It sounds like a hard job, one that requires a lot of attention. The equivalent for mobile casinos is a team pouring through row upon row of data. Lots of numbers and spreadsheets are difficult to look through for hours, so undoubtedly some human error can occur. That’s where artificial intelligence comes in.
AI will be used to track all the games being played at one time and make sure that nobody is cheating by using bots or glitches in systems. This will be especially useful for players that gamble against other people (e.g. poker), and will help to level the playing field and give users more confidence in their casino of choice.
AI is also used to speed up customer service, which will also enhance the user experience for mobile apps, as users will get an instantaneous and informational reply, while the operator of the casino doesn’t need to spend so much on staff and can instead direct that capital towards enhancing the UX some other way.
A potential other avenue for AI is to modulate the pay-out of each game to create a more exciting experience for gamblers. It could also be used to identify the potential for bad losses and send a warning to a gambler letting them know that they might be on tilt.
Images: Vecteezy/vectorpocket via Freepik. Composite by Mikeshouts.com.
